Minor Feelings

See! Anyone can live the American Dream! they’d say about a doctor who came into the country already a doctor

Then, in the documentary Sa-I-Gu (directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson), which interviewed the women whose stores burned down, I heard his mother tell her story.

Because minor feelings are ongoing, they lend themselves more readily to forms and genres that are themselves serial, such as the graphic novel (the Hernandez Brothers, Adrian Tomine) or the serial poem (Wanda Coleman, Solmaz Sharif, Tommy Pico) or the episodic poetic essay (Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine), but also, and more increasingly, are seen in literary fiction (Paul Beatty, Ling Ma).

My term “minor feelings” is deeply indebted to theorist Sianne Ngai, who wrote extensively on the affective qualities of ugly feelings, negative emotions—like envy, irritation, and boredom—symptomatic of today’s late-capitalist gig economy. Like ugly feelings, minor feelings are “non-cathartic states of emotion” with “a remarkable capacity for duration.”

book that explores minor feelings is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

what I call minor feelings: the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from the sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritant of having one’s perception of reality constantly questioned or dismissed

More than three million Koreans died in the Korean War, roughly 10 percent of the population. Among them, untold numbers of innocent civilians were killed because they were in the way or were mistaken for Communist collaborators.

In 1917, the U.S. government expanded the ban to all of Asia, later even restricting Filipinos from coming in, though the Philippines was a former U.S. colony.

1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first immigration law that banned a race from entering the United States, after legislators and media characterized the Chinese as “rats,” “lepers,” but also “machine-like” workers who stole jobs from good white Americans.

The street in which they were lynched was called Calles de los Negros.